Oscar Romero, PhD

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-Barcelona Tech.)

Semantic Aware Business Intelligence

Zusammenfassung

This talk tackles the convergence of two of the most influential technologies in the last decade,
namely business intelligence (BI) and the Semantic Web (SW). BI is used by almost
any enterprise to derive important business-critical knowledge from both internal and (increasingly)
external data. When using external data, most often found on the Web, the most
important issue is knowing the precise semantics of the data. Without this, the results cannot
be trusted. Here, SW technologies come to the rescue, as they allow semantics ranging from
very simple to very complex to be specified for any web-available resource. SW-technologies
do not only support capturing the "passive" semantics, but also support active inference and
reasoning on the data. In this talk, we will present a characterization of BI environments in
terms of what they require, followed by an introduction to the relevant SW foundation concepts.
Then, it goes on to survey the use of SW technologies for data integration, including
semantic data annotation and semantics-aware extract, transform, and load processes
(ETL). Next, we will describe the relationship of multidimensional (MD) models and SW
technologies, including the relationship between MD models and SW formalisms, and the
use of advanced SW reasoning functionality on MD models. Finally, all the findings are discussed
together and a number of directions for future research are posed.

Vortragender

Oscar Romero has an MSc and a PhD in computing from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
Currently, he holds a tenure-track 2 lecturer position at the Barcelona School of Informatics and also the local coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Master on Information
Technologies for Business Intelligence (IT4BI). He is also a member of the MPI research
group at the same university, specializing in software engineering, databases and information
systems, where he has participated in 4 different research projects. His research interests
mainly fall into the business intelligence field, namely data warehousing, OLAP and serviceoriented
BI, semantic-aware formalisms such as the semantic web, ontologies and description
logics that can be used to overcome the semantic gap in BI environments, NOSQL and
alternative storage techniques for large BI data sets and query recommendation, among
others. He has authored articles and papers in international conferences and journals on
these subjects.